Top 5 VLC Playback Tricks – Essential For Power Users

Being the holiday season, chances are you will likely to spend time watching movies and TV shows with your family and friends. If you still use VCL as your go-to primary media player here are some tips and tricks you can leverage to enhance your holiday binge-watching experience.

Keyboard Shortcut for Fast Forward and Rewind

Instead of use mouse to scrub the timeline back and forth, there are actually quite a few keyboard shortcuts that do the same thing with additional precision. VLC offers different keyboard shortcut for fast forward and rewind. Each has a different fixed interval. I personally like to use the 10 seconds jump (Alt + Right arrow), below are a list of all the keyboard shortcuts that allows you to forward or rewind.

Shift + Left or Right arrow: Jump 3 seconds back or forward

Alt + Left or Right arrow: Jump 10 seconds back or forward

Ctrl + Left or Right arrow: Jump 1 minute back or forward

Ctrl + Alt + Left or Right arrow: Jump 5 minute back or forward

For other keyboard shortcuts, some of the useful ones are volume control.

Ctrl + Up or Down arrow: Increase or decrease volume.

M: Mute.

All of the above volume control only affects VLC app itself it does not alter your system-wide volume setting.

Multiple Instance of VLC Player Running Simultaneously

By default, VLC only has one instance open at any given time. That means you cannot play two or more videos side by side. This is a different default behavior compare to Windows’s Media Player. Fortunately, this is easily configurable to allow multiple VLC play at the same time.

Go to Tools > Preferences (or Ctrl + P)

Under the Interface tab, make sure both “Allow only one instance” and “Use only one instance when started from file manager” are unchecked.

Save the setting and restart VLC you will be able to play multiple videos at the same time.

Stream VLC content to Chromecast on Windows

Given the popularity of Chromecast, the latest VLC nightly builds finally added support for this feature. We have a detailed how-to guide document this feature and its limitations, check it out here.

Use VLC to stream live security IP camera

Use VLC to stream RTSP live video. RTSP stands for, Real Time Streaming Protocol. It is most found on surveillance IP cameras or any other live stream that supports this protocol. If that’s something useful to you, check out this detailed how-to guide here.

Use VLC as video converter

Last but not least, you can use VLC as a video format converter. Since it supports a various video codec, VLC can play almost any video format you throw at it, only makes sense it can also output video in any of those formats as well. This is extremely useful if you want to ensure video to be playable on some of the mobile devices that support limited video format.

That’s it. Those are the top 5 features you should take advantage of when you use VLC. Enjoy your holiday video entertainment.